Sunday, September 12, 2010

Links & Reviews

- This year's winners of the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest were announced this week: a hearty congratulations to Andrew Fink, Ryan Julian, Philipp S. Penka, and Bailey N. Pike!

- Writing at Salon, Laura Miller has another look at the lingering problems with some elements of Google Books by interviewing Geoffrey Nunberg.

- Great news this week that the WSJ will launch a pull-out book review section for its weekend editions.

- Over at Lux Mentis, Ian posts on the catalogue [PDF] of miniature books created this summer by his son, Aidan. It's a great collection, and the catalogue is expertly done.

- From "Talk of the Nation," a piece on "the joys" of reading more than one book at a time.

- The Transcribe Bentham Project launched its Transcription Desk this week, beginning a crowd-sourcing experiment that's being watched closely by editors and scholars around the world.

- From Vince Golden at AAS, a report on some new amateur newspapers they've acquired, and some background info on the genre.

- Via EMOB, a preview of "The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794," which promises to be a very useful resource indeed.

- A long-lost Walter Scott poem has been found in a collection of correspondence, and will be read publicly for the first time next week.

- In the BBC Magazine, Lisa Jardine asks "Is our relationship with books changing?" This is a strange piece, with more than one blatant factual inaccuracy and a conclusion which seems quite at odds with the rest of the essay.

- New from the University of Delaware, a digital version of the William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection, which includes some 3,040 bookplates to date.

- I recommend spending some time with "Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions," a new "cluster" of short articles at The New Everyday.

- A Boston Globe reporter book-shops in Greenwich Village.

- A South Korean scholar claims to have discovered the world's oldest known "moveable type."

Reviews

- Robert Remini's At the Edge of the Precipice and David and Jeanne Heidler's Henry Clay; review by Heather Cox Richardson in the WaPo.

- Mary Roach's Packing for Mars; review by Janet Maslin in the Scotsman.